MOGADISHU,
Somalia, June 19, 2010 — Awil Salah Osman prowls the streets of this
shattered city, looking like so many other boys, with ripped-up clothes,
thin limbs and eyes eager for attention and affection.

But Awil
is different in two notable ways: he is shouldering a fully automatic,
fully loaded Kalashnikov assault rifle; and he is working for a military
that is substantially armed and financed by the United States.

“You!” he
shouts at a driver trying to sneak past his checkpoint, his cherubic
face turning violently angry.

The driver
halts immediately. In
Somalia, lives are lost quickly, and few want to take their chances
with a moody 12-year-old.

It is well
known that Somalia’s radical Islamist insurgents are plucking children
off soccer fields and turning them into fighters. But Awil is not a
rebel. He is working for Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, a
critical piece of the American counterterrorism strategy in the Horn of
Africa.

According
to Somali human rights groups andUnited
Nationsofficials,
the Somali government, which relies on assistance from the West to
survive, is fielding hundreds of children or more on the front lines,
some as young as 9.

Child
soldiers are deployed across the globe, but according to the United
Nations, the Somali government is among the “most
persistent violators” of sending children into war, finding itself
on a list with notorious rebel groups like theLord’s
Resistance Army.

Somali
government officials concede that they have not done the proper vetting.
Officials also revealed that the United States government was helping
pay their soldiers, an arrangement American officials confirmed, raising
the possibility that the wages for some of these child combatants may
have come from American taxpayers.

United
Nations officials say they have offered the Somali government specific
plans to demobilize the children. But Somalia’s leaders, struggling for
years to withstand the insurgents’ advances, have been paralyzed by
bitter infighting and are so far unresponsive.

Several
American officials also said that they were concerned about the use of
child soldiers and that they were pushing their Somali counterparts to
be more careful. But when asked how the American government could
guarantee that American money was not being used to arm children, one of
the officials said, “I don’t have a good answer for that.”

Many human
rights groups find this unacceptable, andPresident
Obamahimself,
when this issue was raised during his campaign, did not disagree.

“It is
embarrassing to find ourselves in the company of Somalia, a lawless
land,” he said.

All across
this lawless land, smooth, hairless faces peek out from behind enormous
guns. In blown-out buildings, children chamber bullets twice the size of
their fingers. In neighborhoods by the sea, they run checkpoints and
face down four-by-four trucks, though they can barely see over the hood.

Somali
government officials admit that in the rush to build a standing army,
they did not discriminate.

“I’ll be
honest,” said a Somali government official who spoke on the condition of
anonymity because of the delicacy of the subject, “we were trying to
find anyone who could carry a gun.”

Awil
struggles to carry his. It weighs about 10 pounds. The strap digs into
his bony shoulders, and he is constantly shifting it from one side to
the other with a grimace.

Sometimes
he gets a helping hand from his comrade Ahmed Hassan, who is 15. Ahmed
said he was sent to Uganda more than two years ago for army training,
when he was 12, though his claim could not be independently verified.
American military advisers have been helping oversee the training of
Somali government soldiers in Uganda.

“One of
the things I learned,” Ahmed explained eagerly, “is how to kill with a
knife.”

Children
do not have many options in Somalia. After the government collapsed in
1991, an entire generation was let loose on the streets. Most children
have never sat in a classroom or played in a park. Their bones have been
stunted by conflict-induced famines, their psyches damaged by all the
killings they have witnessed.

“What do I
enjoy?” Awil asked. “I enjoy the gun.”

Like many
other children here, the war has left him hard beyond his years. He
loves cigarettes and is addicted to qat, a bitter leaf that, for the few
hours he chews it each day, makes grim reality fade away.

He was
abandoned by parents who fled to Yemen, he said, and joined a militia
when he was about 7. He now lives with other government soldiers in a
dive of a house littered with cigarette boxes and smelly clothes. Awil
does not know exactly how old he is. His commander says he is around 12,
but birth certificates are rare.

Awil
gobbles down greasy rice with unwashed hands because he does not know
where his next meal is coming from. He is paid about $1.50 a day, but
only every now and then, like most soldiers. His bed is a fly-covered
mattress that he shares with two other child soldiers, Ali Deeq, 10, and
Abdulaziz, 13.

“He should
be in school,” said Awil’s commander, Abdisalam Abdillahi. “But there is
no school.”

Ali Sheikh
Yassin, vice-chairman of Elman Peace and Human Rights Center in
Mogadishu, said that about 20 percent of government troops (thought to
number 5,000 to 10,000) were children and that about 80 percent of the
rebels were. The leading insurgent group, which has drawn increasingly
close toAl
Qaeda, is called theShabaab,
which means youth in Arabic.

“These
kids can be so easily brainwashed,” Mr. Ali said. “They don’t even have
to be paid.”

One of the
myriad dangers Awil faces is constant gunfire between his squad and
another group of government soldiers from a different clan. The Somali
government is racked by divisions from the prime minister’s office down
to the street.

“I’ve lost
hope,” said Sheik Yusuf Mohamed Siad, a defense minister who abruptly
quit in the past week, like several other ministers. “All this
international training, it’s just training soldiers for the Shabab,” he
added, saying defections had increased.

Advisers
to President SheikSharif
Sheik Ahmedsay they have fine-tuned their plans for a coming
offensive, making it more of a gradual military operation to slowly take
the city back from the insurgents.

Awil is
eager for action. His commanders say he has already proven himself
fighting against the Shabab, who used to bully him in the market.

“That made
me want to join the T.F.G.,” he said. “With them, I feel like I am
amongst my brothers.”